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Lost Modernities
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Book Synopsis Lost Modernities by : Alexander Woodside
Download or read book Lost Modernities written by Alexander Woodside and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lost Modernities Alexander Woodside offers a probing revisionist overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations remarkable for their transparent procedures. The quest for merit-based bureaucracy stemmed from the idea that good politics could be established through the "development of people"--the training of people to be politically useful. Centuries before civil service examinations emerged in the Western world, these three Asian countries were basing bureaucratic advancement on examinations in addition to patronage. But the evolution of the mandarinates cannot be accommodated by our usual timetables of what is "modern." The history of China, Vietnam, and Korea suggests that the rationalization processes we think of as modern may occur independently of one another and separate from such landmarks as the growth of capitalism or the industrial revolution. A sophisticated examination of Asian political traditions, both their achievements and the associated risks, this book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history and on global historical time.
Book Synopsis Made Modern by : Edward Jones-Imhotep
Download or read book Made Modern written by Edward Jones-Imhotep and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. Made Modern draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields who write on topics ranging from exploration and infrastructure to the occult sciences and communications. The contributors use histories of science and technology to enrich our understanding of Canadian history and of Canada’s place in a transnational modern world. The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, this book explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.
Download or read book Modern Erasures written by Pierre Fuller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Erasures is an ambitious and innovative study of the acts of epistemic violence behind China's transformation from a semicolonized republic to a Communist state over the twentieth century. Pierre Fuller charts the pedigree of Maoist thought and practice between the May Fourth movement of 1919 and the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 to shed light on the relationship between epistemic and physical violence, book burning and bloodletting, during China's revolutions. Focusing on communities in remote Gansu province and the wider region over half a century, Fuller argues that in order to justify the human cost of revolution and the building of the national party-state, a form of revolutionary memory developed in China on the nature of social relations and civic affairs in the recent past. Through careful analysis of intellectual and cultural responses to, and memories of, earthquakes, famine and other disaster events in China, this book shows how the Maoist evocation of the 'old society' earmarked for destruction was only the most extreme phase of a transnational, colonial-era conversation on the 'backwardness' of rural communities.
Book Synopsis Delimiting Modernities by : Sven Trakulhun
Download or read book Delimiting Modernities written by Sven Trakulhun and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection seeks to contribute to the many long-standing discussions on modernity, but also and more specifically to the more recent debates over trends to pluralize modernity. These debates are current in many different academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature and postcolonial studies. Hitherto, most engagements with modernity in the plural have remained conspicuously confined to one or other intra-disciplinary notion of modernities, such as that of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s “multiple modernities” which has triggered a host of conference papers and publications largely within sociology: all the while, it seems that the literatures, for instance, of multiple modernities and alternative modernities are each distinguished by the fact that one ignores the other. It is the principal aim of this edited volume to subject these disciplinary discussions to a more encompassing view, assembling contributions from different scholars who not only work in different disciplines and regional settings, but who also engage with their research topics in a variety of approaches and at different levels of analysis. The volume thus transcends the sometimes narrow boundaries of the debates over modernities within the established academic disciplines and seeks to turn the unavoidable friction brought about by this interdisciplinary setting into most original and insightful scholarship.
Book Synopsis The Struggle for the West by : Christopher Browning
Download or read book The Struggle for the West written by Christopher Browning and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years debates about the nature and future of the West have been high on the political agenda. Prognoses of the West’s imminent demise have been countered by those arguing for its continued relevance, or those arguing that while the West will survive its nature, and the balance of power between its constituent units, is transforming. This book argues that understanding contemporary developments requires subjecting the very idea of the West to critical scrutiny and in particular asking what kind of concept it actually is. Locating the West as a discursive concept the book argues attempts to save, fix or reclaim the meaning of the West are illustrative of political agendas rather than indicative of accurate claims about the essential nature of the West. In contrast, the book argues that as a concept the West is impregnated with various discursive legacies, the most embedded of which are those of a civilisational, modern and political West. However, while attempts to define the West’s essence are therefore doomed to fail, given the concept’s historical and discursive flexibility, such attempts reaffirm the legitimising role which claims to the West continue to perform. Beyond this, the book challenges traditional genealogies of the West, which overwhelmingly depict the West as an inside-out concept. In contrast, the book argues that historically outsiders have played an important role in defining the nature of the West and constituting it as a political subject; processes that remain evident today. This book will particularly interest students of critical security studies, critical geopolitics, European politics, American politics and IR theory.
Book Synopsis The Labyrinth of Modernity by : Johann P. Arnason
Download or read book The Labyrinth of Modernity written by Johann P. Arnason and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a vital reflection on the unity and diversity of the modern world, this important new book connects with the current debate on multiple modernities and argues that this notion can only be properly understood in a civilizational context. Johann Arnason presupposes the idea of modernity as a new civilization with its specific social imaginary, centred on strong visions of human autonomy but open to differentiation on institutional and ideological levels, as well as in changing historical contexts. The book begins by connecting this perspective to a distinctive framework of social theory, centred on the differentiation of economic, political and cultural spheres. Arnason goes on to deal with Communism as the most important alternative version of modernity, and with East Asian developments as a particularly complex and instructive case of interacting modernities. The book concludes with reflections on globalization theory and ways of reformulating it in light of the civilizational approach.
Book Synopsis China, India and Alternative Asian Modernities by : Sanjay Kumar
Download or read book China, India and Alternative Asian Modernities written by Sanjay Kumar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conception of modernity as a radical rupture from the past runs parallel to the conception of Europe as the primary locus of global history. The essays in this volume contest the temporal and spatial divisions—between past and present, modernity and tradition, and Europe’s progress and Asia’s stasis—which the conventional narrative of modernity creates. Drawing on early modern Chinese and Indian history and culture instead, the authors of the book explore the provenance of modernity beyond the west to see it in a transcultural and pluralistic light. The central argument of this volume is that modernity does not have a singular core or essence—a causal centre. Its key features need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations imagined. By studying the Bhakti movement, Confucian democracy, and the maritime and agrarian economies of China and India, this book enlarges the terms of debate and revisits devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authority, and rural as resources for modernity. This book will be of great interest to researchers and academicians working in the areas of history, Sociology, Cultural Studies, literature, geopolitics, South Asian and East Asian Studies.
Download or read book Religion, Place and Modernity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-05-09 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume Religion, Place and Modernity explores the spatial articulation of religion and modernity in and through places in Southeast and East Asia. Based on ethnographic, historical and theoretical research, the authors aim at a deeper understanding of the articulation of a religious modernity.
Download or read book Lost in Transition written by Yaowei Zhu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the fate of Hong Kong’s unique culture since its reversion to China.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750: Cultures and power by : Hamish M. Scott
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750: Cultures and power written by Hamish M. Scott and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2015 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. Volume II engages with philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment, and examines the military and political developments within and beyond the boundaries of Europe.
Book Synopsis The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam by : Christopher Goscha
Download or read book The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam written by Christopher Goscha and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION'S JOHN K. FAIRBANK PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDHILL HISTORY PRIZE 2017 'This is the finest single-volume history of Vietnam in English. It challenges myths, and raises questions about the socialist republic's political future' Guardian 'Powerful and compelling. Vietnam will be of growing importance in the twenty-first-century world, particularly as China and the US rethink their roles in Asia. Christopher Goscha's book is a brilliant account of that country's history.' - Rana Mitter 'A vigorous, eye-opening account of a country of great importance to the world, past and future' - Kirkus Reviews Over the centuries the Vietnamese have beenboth colonizers themselves and the victims of colonization by others. Their country expanded, shrunk, split and sometimes disappeared, often under circumstances far beyond their control. Despite these often overwhelming pressures, Vietnam has survived as one of Asia's most striking and complex cultures. As more and more visitors come to this extraordinary country, there has been for some years a need for a major history - a book which allows the outsider to understand the many layers left by earlier emperors, rebels, priests and colonizers. Christopher Goscha's new work amply fills this role. Drawing on a lifetime of thinking about Indo-China, he has created a narrative which is consistently seen from 'inside' Vietnam but never loses sight of the connections to the 'outside'. As wave after wave of invaders - whether Chinese, French, Japanese or American - have been ultimately expelled, we see the terrible cost to the Vietnamese themselves. Vietnam's role in one of the Cold War's longest conflicts has meant that its past has been endlessly abused for propaganda purposes and it is perhaps only now that the events which created the modern state can be seen from a truly historical perspective. Christopher Goscha draws on the latest research and discoveries in Vietnamese, French and English. His book is a major achievement, describing both the grand narrative of Vietnam's story but also the byways, curiosities, differences, cultures and peoples that have done so much over the centuries to define the many versions of Vietnam.
Book Synopsis Modern Women in China and Japan by : Katrina Gulliver
Download or read book Modern Women in China and Japan written by Katrina Gulliver and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the dawn of the 1930s a new empowered and liberated image of the female was taking root in popular culture in the West. This 'modern woman' archetype was also penetrating into Eastern cultures, however, challenging the Chinese and Japanese historical norm of the woman as homemaker, servant or geisha. Through a focus on the writings of the Western women who engaged with the Far East, and the Eastern writers and personalities who reacted to this new global gender communication by forming their own separate identities, Katrina Gulliver reveals the complex redefining of the self taking place in a crucial time of political and economic upheaval. Including an analysis of the work of Nobel Prize laureate Pearl S. Buck, The Modern Woman in China and Japan is an important contribution to gender studies and will appeal to historians and scholars of China and East Asia as well as to those studying Asian and American literature.
Book Synopsis East Asia Before the West by : David Kang
Download or read book East Asia Before the West written by David Kang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368 to the start of the Opium Wars in 1841, China has engaged in only two large-scale conflicts with its principal neighbors, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. These four territorial and centralized states have otherwise fostered peaceful and long-lasting relationships with one another, and as they have grown more powerful, the atmosphere around them has stabilized. Focusing on the role of the "tribute system" in maintaining stability in East Asia and fostering diplomatic and commercial exchange, Kang contrasts this history against the example of Europe and the East Asian states' skirmishes with nomadic peoples to the north and west. Scholars tend to view Europe's experience as universal, but Kang upends this tradition, emphasizing East Asia's formal hierarchy as an international system with its own history and character. His approach not only recasts common understandings of East Asian relations but also defines a model that applies to other hegemonies outside of the European order.
Book Synopsis Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History by : Zheng Yangwen
Download or read book Ten Lessons in Modern Chinese History written by Zheng Yangwen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a timely and solid portrait of modern China from the First Opium War to the Xi Jinping era. Unlike the handful of existing textbooks that only provide narratives, this textbook fashions a new and practical way to study modern China. Written exclusively for university students, A-level or high school teachers and students, it uses primary sources to tell the story of China and introduces them to existing scholarship and academic debate so they can conduct independent research for their essays and dissertations. This book will be required reading for students who embark on the study of Chinese history, politics, economics, diaspora, sociology, literature, cultural, urban and women’s studies. It would be essential reading to journalists, NGO workers, diplomats, government officials, businessmen and travellers.
Book Synopsis Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought by : Andrew Hammond
Download or read book Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought written by Andrew Hammond and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an innovative reappraisal of the impact of Late Ottoman Turkish scholars on modern Islamic thought.
Book Synopsis King Chǒngjo, an Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea by : Christopher Lovins
Download or read book King Chǒngjo, an Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea written by Christopher Lovins and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first detailed analysis in English of monarchy and governance in Korea during King Chŏngjo’s reign. Were the countries of Europe the only ones that were “early modern”? Was Asia’s early modernity cut short by colonialism? Scholars examining early modern Eurasia have not yet fully explored the relationships between absolute rule and political modernization in the highly contested early modern world. Using a comparative perspective that places Chŏngjo, king of Korea from 1776 to 1800, in context with other Korean kings and with contemporary Chinese and European rulers, Christopher Lovins examines the shifting balance of power in Korea in favor of the crown at the expense of the aristocracy during the early modern period. This book is the first to analyze in English the recently discovered collection of 297 private letters written by Chŏngjo himself. These letters were a vital channel of communication outside of official court historians’ scrutiny, since private meetings between the king and his ministers were forbidden by custom. Royal politics played out in an arena of subtle communication, with court officials trying to read the king’s unstated, elliptically hinted at intentions and the king trying to suggest what he wanted done while maintaining plausible deniability. Through close analysis of both official records and private letters, including Chŏngjo’s “secret letters,” Lovins shows that, in contrast to previous assumptions, the late eighteenth-century Korean monarchs were not weak and ineffective but instead were in the process of building an absolutist polity.
Book Synopsis The Modern Spirit of Asia by : Peter van der Veer
Download or read book The Modern Spirit of Asia written by Peter van der Veer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-27 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative look at religion and spirituality in postcolonial China and India The Modern Spirit of Asia challenges the notion that modernity in China and India are derivative imitations of the West, arguing that these societies have transformed their ancient traditions in unique and distinctive ways. Peter van der Veer begins with nineteenth-century imperial history, exploring how Western concepts of spirituality, secularity, religion, and magic were used to translate the traditions of India and China. He traces how modern Western notions of religion and magic were incorporated into the respective nation-building projects of Chinese and Indian nationalist intellectuals, yet how modernity in China and India is by no means uniform. While religion is a centerpiece of Indian nationalism, it is viewed in China as an obstacle to progress that must be marginalized and controlled. The Modern Spirit of Asia moves deftly from Kandinsky's understanding of spirituality in art to Indian yoga and Chinese qi gong, from modern theories of secularism to histories of Christian conversion, from Orientalist constructions of religion to Chinese campaigns against magic and superstition, and from Muslim Kashmir to Muslim Xinjiang. Van der Veer, an outspoken proponent of the importance of comparative studies of religion and society, eloquently makes his case in this groundbreaking examination of the spiritual and the secular in China and India.
